


Burn-In

by Chromat1cs



Series: Data Flood [1]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Alternate Universe - Future, Alternate Universe - Non-Magical, Alternate Universe - Robots & Androids, Anal Fingering, Anal Sex, Android Sirius, Chronic Pain, Coming In Pants, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Explicit Consent, Explicit Language, Explicit Sexual Content, Injured Remus, Life-Affirming Sex, M/M, Medication, Mutual Masturbation, Oral Sex, Robot Kink, Robot/Human Relationships, Sex Robots, Size Kink, wolfstar
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-27
Updated: 2018-07-27
Packaged: 2019-06-16 22:07:33
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 17,981
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15446892
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chromat1cs/pseuds/Chromat1cs
Summary: Embittered and isolated after an accident that turns his world inside-out, Remus Lupin caves under the steady pressure of flashy advertising—“S-04: LIFE AS YOU LIKE IT.” A significantly maddening slogan when one doesn’t even know what’s worth liking anymore.Boy-meets-sexbot in an explicit exploration of self-worth, compassion, and the difficulties of jumping the hurdles of life when your legs aren’t quite working.





	Burn-In

**_Burn-in_ ** _is the process by which components of a system are exercised prior to being placed in service (and often, prior to the system being completely assembled from those components). This testing process will force certain failures to occur under supervised conditions so an understanding of load capacity of the product can be established._

—

The box, ushered into Remus’ apartment by a delivery droid, is as tall as a man standing upright. Peering at it from his wheelchair, Remus already feels talked-down to by the product he’s only seen in banner ads. _This was such a fucking mistake._

“[Will that be all you need today, sir?]”

Remus looks at the delivery droid, all metal, bipedal and decidedly human with four limbs but without any of the facial features that would make it sympathetic, and wheels himself around to the other side of the massive new delivery. “Yes, thank you.” He hates the way his voice feels vaguely strained, but he takes solace in the fact that the droid lacks the ability to hear that nuance. “Dismissed.”

“[Confirmed. Have an enlightened day, sir.]”

Remus says nothing in return as his front door slides shut with a soft hydraulic hiss and the gentle mechanical click of security locks settling to. Alone in his apartment, Remus glares at the carbon-fiber case looming at the center of the sitting room like a monolith. Emblazoned across all four of its gleaming white sides in silver text, the product’s title shouts out at Remus in overeager minimalism—

_S-04: LIFE AS YOU LIKE IT._

Remus stares at the letters and the sleek Lumos Corporation branding in heavy silence until it all becomes just shapes to his eyes. He wheels closer to the package and touches hesitantly at its surface, nearly recoiling when the hard casing meets his fingertips with cold, solid plastic. Remus wonders if the product inside will feel just as synthetic before he makes a disgusted sound to himself for even entertaining the thought of opening the box.

“No more doped browsing, you fucking squiff,” Remus growls to himself as he wrenches backwards at his wheels and steers quickly into the kitchen.

Hopping up on his painkillers had gotten him into this mess. Drinking ether couldn’t get him out of it, but it could sure as hell make him quit feeling the mistake too deeply.

Androids are fucking expensive. Accordingly to the confirmation message waiting on his bedside dock when he awoke this morning, Remus Lupin had bought one on a whim in the wee hours of the night.

Remus presses his palm to the refrigerator door and it hisses open to bare its insides with a pleasant little chime—eight bottles of ether, three calorie packs, some sad-looking produce from yesterday’s delivery, and a box of half-finished noodles from the stall on the corner last week. Remus leans in take up one of the ethers and twists it open with a slight grimace as the edges of its topper bite into his palm. He downs a large gulp of it and wonders for the thousandth time how anybody can stomach any flavor of the drink besides the vaguely-citrusy burn of Original.

“Merlin,” he calls out to his home system, pausing a moment for the mellow little wake tone to let him know it’s readied for his voice commands, “read me my bank statement.”

_“State your security PIN, please.”_

“RJL60.” He knows he should make his PINs harder to crack, but it’s been easy over the past couple of years to let things like security fall to the wayside.

_“Your account currently holds 126 credits of available funds. Your pending transactions total 2,339 credits.”_

“FUCK!” Remus sputters, choking on a gulp of ether. He hadn’t known the impulse buy was _that_ much of a blow to his savings. The AI waits with a second warm ping at the assumption that Remus’ outburst was another voice command; Remus swipes at the corners of his mouth with his wrist and stills himself with a sigh. “Resume.”

The system indicator light on the wall beside the front door turns from amber to green as the AI continues; _“Transaction history of the previous 24 hours: 0900 hours, 29 credits at Lumos Grocer Fresh; 2358 hours, 10 credits at ServoFucker.lu; 0204 hours, 2,300 credits at Lumos PulseCore.”_

Remus feels heat rise in his cheeks at the proof of his sordid evening spelled out for him. He remembers taking a full dose of pills just around 11:00, desperate to kill the radiating, ever-present pain in both knees where the adaptive machinery of his lower legs meets his organic flesh. He also remembers starting in on a quick wank, but obviously the blackout high had hit before he finished and made him horny for paywalled android porn along the way. _Shit._ It was embarrassing enough that he’d blown three months of disability on one for himself, but to have done it with his cock in hand? Remus hisses another sigh to himself and looks sideways at the box in the middle of the apartment, out-of-place with its pristine shape amid Remus’ simple belongings.

“You have no bloody self-control, Remus,” he announces to himself. He resolves to keep a better hold on his faculties.

As inconvenient as it stands for crossing through the little shoebox of an apartment, Remus leaves the package untouched for several days. He might get off to androids when he’s irredeemably high, but he refuses to tumble even further down the rabbit hole of the pouty, plastic bots splashed over the LCD billboard across the highway outside that screams bright pink into his sitting room when night falls. _S-04: LIFE AS YOU LIKE IT. PLEASURE FOR ALL WALKS, A DREAM OF YOUR OWN DOING._ In the months directly after his accident, the proximity of “pleasure” and “walk” made Remus snort derisively to himself with the unique prickle of acute offense deep in his guts. Nowadays, the slogan and the image of the default female and male S-04 models from the waist up, openly climaxing together, just makes him feel bored from behind his auto-vent blinds when he can’t sleep and stares numbly out at the street.

Modern technology is a saving grace, of that Remus can be sure. But he doesn’t have to like it.

—

It seems that either way he slices it, his pain medication wants Remus to fuck an android.

The first time, it was the stupid little hexagonal tablets that got his blood up for it. Now it’s the staunch refusal to dose on anymore of them four days later that makes Remus wheel over to the box angrily and start fussing with its fastens for a desperate hope at some kind of distraction. The massive box had blocked the line of sight between the television and the couch since its arrival, so Remus had been subsisting on streaming from his tablet and listening to audiobooks through the Merlin’s wall speakers while he’d stewed on what the fuck to do with the package. Opening it now is the last bastion of Remus’ patience, further stoked by the unyielding vein-deep frustration at his body that currently makes him want to tear at any sort of machinery to quell the feeling.

Remus’ legs, severed unevenly but cleanly at their separate divide where they attach to his robotic replacement limbs, are afire with phantom pain as he grits his teeth and thumbs at the release switches on the Lumos-emblazoned packaging. _Ignore it, ignore it, fucking ignore it, don’t you dare take more Cynodrix, that shit will rot you from the inside out._ Remus stays his glance to the little blue bottle he can see on the lip of the sink through the open bathroom door. He forces his attention ever closer to the box before him.

It’s difficult to maneuver around the package with a wheelchair despite the compact wheel frame and Remus’ familiarity with how he moves, but Remus eventually get the last of the safety catches removed. He gives in for the barest moment to the thrum of apprehension just behind his throat as a seal within the box hisses open and the front of the box slides away with a noiseless glide. It’s genius engineering, something he might have tinkered with years ago before his body was plagued with spangling hurt and he could hardly make it down the stairs to the street. The same pink LCD color from the adverts fades in to briefly replace the box cover, projected by a row of tiny lights on the inner border of the box.

 _“YOUR DREAM IS ABOUT TO UNFOLD,”_ declares a sultry voice, velvety with the unique lilt of mechanical perfection. Remus’ pelvis warms with the subconscious connection of that timbre and his blitzed browsing habits, and he glares at the box as if it could make his less-than-ideal stirs of arousal tessellate away as the pink overlay does to begin revealing the contents of the box.

Well.

As hard on his bank account and maddeningly reckless medicated Remus had been, Remus has to admit in the present that his taste holds up.

The android still in stasis within its ballistic foam cushioning before him is, frankly, gorgeous. Its body is tall and lean, broad-shouldered and perfectly built beneath unblemished synthetic skin. Dark, tumbled hair falls just past its collarbones, framing a face made up of severe and aristocratic lines. Its long eyelashes are closed against high cheeks, accented by a smooth forehead and full, sleek eyebrows. Remus catalogues the rest of its body—pink pulse thrumming slowly in a soft bloom where its “heart” regulates its internal systems through a glowing node at the center of its chest in Lumos’ signature hexagon shape, chest muscles sculpted in perfect strong swells, abdominals made just as conventionally appealing, a trail of dark hair that dips unseen into small, tight black silk shorts; long legs well-muscled and peppered with similar hair, those subtle touches of humanity that make PulseCore’s androids second to none. Its skin probably gives with the same warmth and softness that Remus can hardly remember from the last time he touched somebody. Remus swallows around a blush he feels raking up his throat— _This is so stupid, pull yourself together, Lupin._

“[Merlin home system detected. Connect and boot?]”

The voice floats out from nested speakers at the side of the box. Remus sees the apartment’s system light flicker amber as it wakes to await his command, so Remus clears his throat after he revels for a moment in what feels for some reason like his final scrap of fucked-up, frustrated normalcy.

“Proceed.”

A short little melody chimes from the PulseCore box as the home system flashes green. The gentle whir of processor fans starts up, a vaguely comforting sound like a purr despite the fact that Remus has never been partial cats, and the android’s eyes blink open as if emerging from a dream.

 _Fuck._ Of course it’s painfully attractive when it looks down at Remus with a piercing, pale stare. Of-fucking-course strung-out Remus selected “silver” in the ocular unit cosmetics option. He always was drawn to disastrously beautiful things.

“[Greetings,]” the android says from its place still encased in the shipping foam, “[Awaiting alignment. If this is your first time purchasing an S-04 unit, or you would like an introduction to your new S-04 unit, please say ‘Startup’ now.]”

It’s vaguely eerie to hear the default service droid voice coming from something so lifelike. Remus shifts in his wheelchair, feeling strangely inadequate under the android’s stare, and whets his lips with a nervous tongue. “Startup.”

Something flickers in the android’s eyes, a subtle and arc-quick widening and shrinking of its pupil apertures, before it speaks again. “[Your PulseCore android exists to serve, and as such its software is built to learn. As your android adapts to your lifestyle, it will take on more awareness of its role and integrate more seamlessly into its place in your home, and as that transition develops you will be able to speak to your S-04 unit with a more natural human exchange pattern that will quickly become identical to conscious conversation. In order to make your android’s integration as comfortable as possible, PulseCore has several settings that will enable further tailoring of your S-04 experience. Please say ‘Personalize’ now.]”

“Personalize,” Remus says through a wince. His right leg twitches violently with a spear of pain that dulls as quickly as it stabbed, and he rubs at the lower part of his thigh with the heel of his hand on its sensory threshold of numbness and feeling.

“[Your S-04 unit is equipped with a modular voicebox,]” the android explains, still looking at Remus with a soft neutral smile and that tinny voice that doesn’t match its features at all. “[There are several stock options included with your S-04 unit, or you may instruct the system to learn the vocal formants of an extant voice. Which option suits your needs most closely?]”

Remus nearly shudders under the watch of the android at the thought of making a machine mimic a living person’s voice. The videos he’s seen, pornography or otherwise, of people making their S-04 units perfectly match a celebrity or human partner—or even exes in the more twisted shock posts he’s stumbled across—ignite the part of Remus’ brain that makes him want to turn off his connection for the night and stew in the disgust of what tech can make some people do. “Let me hear the stock options,” Remus says clearly.

“[Stock options accessed.] This is stock option number one. I am an S-04 android unit, engineered for service. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow. I look forward to our time together. [Would you like to hear the next option?]”

It’s a nice voice, a vibrant tenor on Remus’ untrained but discerning ear, but it doesn’t quite fit the way Remus perceives the sturdy masculinity in front of him. Remus furrows his brow to himself. It’s a fucking pleasure droid, for fuck’s sake. He shouldn’t be caring this much.

But the android looks steadily at Remus and, Remus notices for the first time, blinks. Its chest also rises and falls with an even and wholly realistic imitation of calm breathing. If a third party were to walk into the little apartment right now, it would seem as though Remus had invited in a very strangely dressed but completely organic human. The only pieces giving away the android’s machinery are the soft hum of its innards, the occasional flicker of processing behind its irises, and the faint pink glow under the rondel at the center of its chest that could easily be covered with clothing. Remus swallows his pride. Hell. He could do with some indulgence these days, goodness knows he fucking paid for it.

“Yes.”

“This is stock option number two. I am an S-04 android unit, engineered for service. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow. I look forward to our time together. [Would you like to hear the next option?]”

It’s a bit deeper, but still pillowed in something pouty that makes Remus’ inner vision swim with that toxic pink of the S-04 advertisements. “Yes.”

Remus listens through the next three options until it lands on the sixth voice. It stirs something, embarrassingly, at Remus’ core to hear the android before him speak the test phrase with a slightly gravelled, low-throated voice that sounds as though its human owner might be one who smokes unfiltered cigarillos and rides a lightbike like a bat out of hades—wears leather, has tattoos, fucks like he _means it—_

“Accept option six,” Remus says quickly, shifting in his seat again as he curses himself for getting hot and bothered by thoughts of past encounters and a fucking _automated vocal option._ This is so stupid. He stares at his feet, the mechanical tarsals visible without socks or shoes on, and rolls his tongue across his front teeth in an attempt to wipe the thoughts of fucking out of his brain.

Trying not to think of fucking, in front of a pleasure android. _Cheers, Remus, you’ve officially flown off your rocker._

“Vocal settings saved,” the android says, abandoning the service droid voice and staying with the new option. It blurs the line between man and machine even further, and with Remus’ eyes averted to the floor it seems uncanny. “What role will your S-04 android be primarily fulfilling for you? If you you would like a list of common roles for Lumos PulseCore S-04 units, please say ‘Menu’ now.”

“Menu.”

“S-04 units are equipped to specialize in pleasure, housework, invalid care, or a combination of those roles. Which role best suits your needs?”

Remus thinks for a moment, disappointed in his lack of willpower but completely unsurprised at the amount of time he takes to linger on the possibility of devoting this android to nothing but fucking. _2,300 credits for a fucktoy._ It certainly wouldn’t have been the first time he spent far too much money on something far too useless. But he figures he might as well make the best of a shitty decision and sighs lightly before looking back up at the android. “A combination of all three.”

The android takes a moment to process the command, its eyelids fluttering slightly and lips twitching as if lost in a startling thought. After a brief pause it smiles a bit wider at Remus, warmer, with a bit more purpose behind it. Remus feels himself flush slightly. He doesn’t return it.

“One more step before setup is complete,” it says cheerfully, melodically, that low voice almost colored with a chuckle and oh, it does absolutely _riotous_ things to the pit of Remus’ stomach. “You may address me as S-04 at your leisure, but I am also equipped to respond to any given name. What would you have me called?”

Remus thinks back again to the scummier android porn he’s scrolled past—people addressing their units as Bitch, Slut, Pig, Whore, the gamut of degradation. Remus has never gotten off on humiliation, and if he’s going to be sharing a space with a droid he might as well try to make it feel as human as possible. The psychologist he’d seen for two years after his accident before quitting and falling into reclusivity always suggested that Remus try to be around more people to distract him from his own darker corners. Loneliness had long gotten comfortable, but it had also gotten old.

Maybe accidentally dropping a small fortune on a synthetic partner wasn’t the worst thing that could have happened. He recalls with a blink the name of an old pulp space-action novel hero he used to fantasize about as a teenager, his first foray into the frisson of his sexuality—the one whose portrait, he realizes now, he’d halfway modeled the android’s features after in his pill-addled haze of horny bullshit. Great. Some things never fucking change.

Remus sits up a bit straighter and meets the android’s bright gaze with drawn-up assertion and finally manages a sardonic smile, not all there but, for the first time in several long and quiet month, not completely lost.

“Sirius.”

—

It takes another week of adjusting to the stilted coexistence with the S-04 before Remus caves and actually uses it for something besides cleaning up the apartment. It offers several times to help Remus in and out of his chair, but something visceral keeps Remus from accepting even simple help from the android if it involves touching him. Besides, Remus has done just fine on his own up until now. He has to admit though, the android keeps the apartment tidier than ever and does more for meals with the meager deliveries of groceries than Remus ever could. He hasn’t had to leave for takeout all week.

Still, he isn’t wholly adapted to the presence of the android. The potential of feeling the synthetic skin still keeps Remus’ bonding instincts at bay. Whether it’s because he might hate or love it he doesn’t delve deep enough to tell.

But instincts be fucked when four bottles of ether are involved.

Late on the sixth night of sharing his apartment with the impulse-bought android, Remus turns to look at where Sirius has put itself into stasis on the other end of the couch. It lounges with incredibly human-like posture, its head propped on one arm with its eyes closed as it lays in peaceful repose as though it were just having a nap. Remus shifts himself closer and mutes the television with a tap to the tablet on his armrest, so only the soft sounds of Sirius’ internal machinery twin with the muffled sounds of the city bustling around beyond the plexi of the wide side window. Remus listens for a little while, strangely content, as he polishes off the dregs of his fourth ether that night. He’s begun feeling it in the pleasant pitch of his faculties, at the point where everything feels just fuzzy enough around its edges to be pleasant in the dark; exactly the same point at which he’d normally take a tablet of Cynodrix to compound the fuzziness into something truly obliviating. Good thing Sirius’ militant cleaning has relegated the pill bottle to its proper place, somewhere Remus wouldn’t know to look and might not even be able to reach in the first place.

“No more of _that,”_ Remus hums to himself matter-of-factly, and he jumps slightly when Sirius stirs at the sound of his voice and turns its attention to him.

“How may I be of assistance, Remus?” Sirius asks warmly, its voice low in the dark of the apartment. The light from the billboard outside spills in to tint everything with a soft layer of pink, matching the shade of Sirius’ steadily-pulsing processor where it shows, muted, beneath the fabric of the extra shirt Remus had found a few days ago to give the android. It had been weird to have it doing things about the apartment shirtless—enjoyable to watch, but weird.

Remus looks at it fuzzily for a moment, blinking at the way Sirius stretches and yawns as a real man would have. “Why did you do that?” He asks without quite meaning to.

“Do what?”

“Stretch, yawn. You don’t need oxygen, your body doesn’t have muscles that can cramp. What was that?”

“I have thousands of idle functions queued for hundreds of thousands of potential situations in which I might find myself. Integration with human movement is my core injunction, which is based primarily on what one does in moments of pause. I stretched and yawned because in the same situation, somebody with muscles and a need for oxygen would have done the same thing.”

Sirius explains his programming as Remus stares at it openly, with those strong and perfectly-articulated hands winnowing in the air with the same aimless shapes as a human talking with their hands. It’s mesmerizing, would have been even without all the ether in his system.

“You’re so real,” Remus murmurs to himself, a thought he had meant to keep in but has clearly let slip as he watches the pleased smile curve onto Sirius’ lips. Its pretty, silken-looking, perfect lips.

“That is the point of my model, yes,” it sallies as it leans its cheek onto its hand again, another “idle function” that only further blurs the line to Remus’ swimming brain between the camps of Organic and Synthetic. It’s being _snarky._ Remus had no idea fuck droids could even be programmed for sass.

“I’m sorry if you’ve been bored here,” Remus blurts. _Fuck, Remus, why are you apologizing to a machine?_ Sirius mirrors his incredulity but calmly, a short exhale of a laugh through his nose. Utterly human.

“I have been able to take care of housework and aid you with food preparation in a kitchen not suited for a handicapped person, I assure you I have been sufficiently stimulated,” Sirius replies easily. Remus swallows hard around a sudden flare of arousal in his chest at the way the word _Stimulated_ rolls from Sirius’ tongue. He’s glad for the fluorescent blush from the billboard outside and the dancing splash of the television screen that work together to mottle the flush that takes over his cheeks, but Remus’ stomach twists when Sirius’ mouth tips up knowingly in a different brand of smile.

“What, did I do something wrong?” Remus asks stupidly, cursing his inability to articulate any feeling beyond dopey simplicity with the tiny slice of his mind not taken over by ether-bound fog. Sirius rakes a hand through its hair, long hair, inky strands that part around its fingers like rich dye, and tips its head to the side as it watches Remus with that same little amused smile. The column of its throat looks rouged in the half-light, and Remus finds himself staring as he runs his tongue along his bottom lip.

“Your heart rate has just increased significantly,” Sirius murmurs, “and I detect a change in your body temperature displacement. How are you feeling, Remus?”

Remus blinks several times and tries to ignore the way the pitch of the android’s voice goes straight to his cock. “Fine,” he says palely, shifting in his seat to face the muted television. _I will not fuck the fuckbot, I will not fuck the fuckbot._ In his periphery, he sees Sirius still watching him with intrigued patience.

“You’re aroused,” it says plainly.

“Excuse you!” Remus cries.

“Excuse me?” Sirius’ voice sounds surprised, even though the fucking thing could apparently sense the changes in Remus’ body temperature and probably estimate the next time Remus was going to sneeze with a margin of error down the the millisecond. _This was a mistake._

“I’m going to bed,” Remus insists loudly, suddenly, shifting himself in awkward scoots toward his wheelchair sitting empty at the other end of the sofa. He winces when his lack of balance tips him to land heavily on one of his useless metal legs, and he collapses to the side and begins to slide to the floor with a grunt of pain. _This was such a mistake, this was a fucking awful mistake_ —

Remus can’t hold in his gasp when he feels the warm hand catch him by the waist to keep him upright. He looks immediately to his side, room spinning slightly from the violent tilt to his axis, and sees Sirius watching him with distant and rapid flickers in the pinhole light beyond its pupils. He realizes, belatedly, that the android has pulled Remus close against its body to keep him from rolling to the floor. Its processors hum, faint and warm, against Remus’ side. The city beyond the window reflects in several facets against the surface of Sirius’ eyes. Remus catches his breath and tries for words twice before they arrive.

“Thank you,” he finally says. Sirius smiles at him, close and gentle and _Fucking hell, he truly looks alive._

“You’re welcome, Remus. Do you still need to go to bed?”

Remus realizes through the slog of drink that he’s touching Sirius for the first time all week. He isn’t leaping out of his skin. He isn’t bursting into flames. He isn’t being flooded with arcing electricity the way all the worst sensationalist rags go on about, charring himself to a crisp from marrow to fingertips. He’s just being held.

And damn it all, it feels wonderful.

“No, I don’t think I do,” Remus whispers. Sirius nod and settles him back into a comfortable sit on the sofa, but as it moves back to return to stasis on the other end of the seat—or whatever the hell androids do amidst infuriating and confusing sexual tension—Remus stays it with an insistent hand to its shirt collar. It turns to Remus with a surprising but satisfying pulse of rosy light ebbing brightly from its core processor, just for a moment, like a suspended breath, before returning to its normal gentle rate.

“Can I help you with anything?” Sirius murmurs. In the shaft of nighttime that’s found its way across Sirius’ face, a mix of the auto-vent blinds shadows and the dancing shapes from the television screen, the android’s expression looks almost organic. Its breath has heightened, at the top of his throat like it would in any normal man, clearly a well-calculated balance of anatomical flux from the top line at PulseCore. Remus’ chest flexes. He’s not going to like himself in the morning, but who the fuck is he kidding? He only really tolerates himself as it stands.

With his hand still twisted in Sirius’ shirt, Remus pulls the android forward to close the distance between them. It takes a moment for his complex thought to catch up with his body, but the sensation of kissing Sirius rolls through him like the snarl of fire on paper. Its mouth feels perfect, petaled, pliant to meet Remus’ offering with smooth expertise that makes Remus tilt his head and pull closer. Remus inhales sharply around the kiss as heat pools madly in his pelvis as though poured thick with lava, and he surrenders to the feeling of blatant and fantastic purpose.

Sirius is warm, warm, so fucking _warm,_ and knows exactly how to hold Remus without having to be directed. Remus melts against the android, the pain in his legs forgotten, the hammer of his heart and the sweetness of Sirius’ nearness all-encompassing. If this is what he’s been missing by thinking fuck droids were nothing but a technological gimmick, Remus is furious at his past self. This is brilliant. This is absolutely, deliciously brilliant.

Sirius’ control of their kiss presses Remus backward into the couch with a quiet and perfectly-tuned desire that stokes Remus’ insides like jet fuel. He thinks for a split second that with the connection to his Merlin system, Sirius has likely been able to access Remus’ porn habits. It probably knows what Remus likes best, tablet propped in one hand while the other busies itself beneath the sheets abed at night—the videos of people masturbating with indulgent bliss, being edged and fingered by androids and others alike, the stories he reads hungrily of being debauched and wrecked at another’s direction—

“Remus.”

Sirius’ lowered voice devours Remus’ train of thought, speaking softly against Remus’ lips, and Remus surges forward to pull him into a kiss again, twice, three times before he lets himself stop for air. When he finally leans back to meet the calm silver of Sirius’ eyes, Remus’ breath is quietly ragged and his simple cotton shorts are beginning to strain.

“What,” Remus fairly gasps. Sirius’ gaze flickers across Remus’ body, analytical with an undeniable touch of baked-in tenderness, and Remus is mad for it. Ether and loneliness is a horrible combination. A horrible, perfect combination.

“I will need you to tell me what you want if this is to continue beyond kissing. My program is engineered for very clear consent only,” Sirius explains, its voice still hemmed thickly with that pitch-perfect headiness. “Unless you want it to remain at kissing, in which case we can continue as we were until you are satisfied.”

Remus takes a moment to catalogue their position as a particularly brilliant wash of color spews across the apartment from the light of the television—an advertisement for Lumos’ newest automobile AI interrupting the film still running muted on the late night network. Remus legs are splayed, painless for once in this swirling swell of arousal, and his sweatshirt is half-rucked up his torso from where he’s looped his arms around Sirius’ shoulders. Sirius has, by Remus’ pulling behest, nearly climbed completely atop Remus to pour those incredible kisses into him. _He’s so close, I need him on me again, I need him to touch me, I need_ —

“Make me come.” Remus finds his voice with a rasping start that takes him halfway by surprise. “I—get on your knees.”

Sirius’ pupils dilate, a stuttering and subtle movement caught in a flash of blue from the television as the android processes Remus’ request. “I can do that,” it confirms after a moment.

“Good,” Remus says with what he hopes is strength but hears instead as nearly puling thanks.

Without another word between them, Sirius situates itself in a graceful kneel on the floor before Remus. It kisses the inside of Remus’ left thigh, an eerie feeling that starts at his knee on a patch of skin without any surface feeling left on it and moves steadily into searing presence with the perfect press of Sirius’ lips bringing its mouth to the edge of Remus’ shorts.

“Do you want to leave these on?” Sirius murmurs as it runs a finger along a hem. Remus is half-gone with drink and arousal, so he hardly hears the question and nods.

“Fucking _sure_ , Sirius, just go for it, I— _oh,”_ he gasps. He truly feels it now, the inferno in his belly that will wait for no one, he’s hard as he’s ever been and, he feels with a shudder and a low groan as Sirius wraps a hand around him through the fabric trapping his length, already beginning to drip. He throws his head back and buries his fingers in the soft curtain of the android’s hair, desperate for purchase amid the rioting pleasure.

“You have a lovely body,” Sirius hums. It shifts its grip on Remus’ cock to stroke him beneath the gapping leg of his shorts, and Remus’ hips buck slightly into the direct contact of soft warmth radiating from Sirius’ palm.

“Another ‘idle function,’ complimenting your human?” Remus babbles as he gasps around another slow twist of Sirius’ hand. Damn the alluring fucking machine, it _chuckles_ at Remus and nuzzles into the grip at its scalp. Remus’ insides curl in and over themselves with aimless ardor when Sirius’ eyes meet his from its kneel. Its stare reaches down into Remus and tugs hard at his resolve, and Remus relents to it with welcome openness.

“My program adapts to my surroundings,” Sirius explains as it kneads gently at Remus’ bared thigh with its free hand, just enough to stoke the embers in Remus’ belly but not enough to dig into the sheared nerve endings that prod him with pain so constantly. “I’ve spent six days, 5 hours, and 14 minutes in your home, and I’ve been able to observe the way you move through it. It is an objective fact that you have a very attractive body, even if you do tend to abuse it with more ether than your stature needs to feel pleasantly intoxicated and a history of opioid overuse.”

At the punishingly-accurate analysis of his own propensities, Remus clenches his jaw and, unconsciously, the fist balled in Sirius’ hair. The android hisses in with a wince, its flawless teeth baring for a brief moment, and the processor core pulses a deeper pink for several beats. Remus’ cock twitches in Sirius’ hand at the show of surprised arousal, and he wonders if the androids are programmed to learn kinks the same way they adapt to conversation.

“Apologies if I’ve offended you, Remus,” Sirius murmurs. Its hand hasn’t stilled its steady tending to Remus’ achingly-hard cock since it started, and Remus can practically feel his mind warring between arousal and petulance all at once before the need for release overtakes it all.

“None taken,” Remus says roughly, “but you can make up for it by using your mouth.”

“Of course,” Sirius replies; another smile, devilish at its corners— _Fucking hell, these machines learn fast—_ Remus’ mind smashes to a halt as Sirius opens its mouth to stick out its slick, red tongue and stripe it up Remus’ cock from base to tip overtop of his shorts.

“Oh _fuck,”_ Remus whimpers, plaintive and keening and so far gone that he can almost see the blinding approach of climax behind his eyelids already when his face contorts with bliss. It’s been three years since anyone, any _thing,_ has touched him besides his own right hand, spent any sort of tenderness on him besides the scrimmy pity glances of people who watch him in his wheelchair if he makes it outside in rare and grudging forays, taken _care_ of him—

Remus chokes on a breath as Sirius guides his cock out of the skewed leg if his shorts and takes it into its mouth, slicked over with Remus’ own precum, in a deep and even rhythm. Its mouth is wet heat, indiscernible from Remus’ memories of bygone human encounters outside of the old lightbike bars and in hurried bedroom twilight hours years and years ago, and Remus decides in an instant that if purchasing an android was truly a mistake then it’s the single best mistake he’s ever made.

“I’m close,” Remus gasps after several feckless passes of Sirius’ tongue along the sweet spot under his cockhead, his hips tipping upward heedless of the prickling resistance in his knees, “I’m gonna come, Sirius, I’m gonna fucking come—!”

Looking down past the mussed landscape of his sweatshirt and the pale auburn hair trailing down his stomach, under the guiding pressure of his white-knuckled fist, Remus looks straight into Sirius’ watchful eyes. Beyond the flicker of adaptive computation, machine learning at its fucking finest, Remus sees something in those silver eyes that looks like a spur of challenge. _Come then,_ it seems to say as its tongue curls once more with a final expert twist around Remus’ cock. Remus nods with an affirmative sort of moan—doesn’t know why, unraveled, undone, untrapped, untethered, suspended, severed, oh _fuck,_ here is it, the arrival at what he craves so fiercely, crashing up through his body like violent spume on rocks to surge into his veins with dizzying speed. Remus spends deep into Sirius’ throat with six, seven, _eight_ heavy, twitching pulses and a cry that cracks over the fulcrum of his own tongue, halfway dying in his mouth as Remus cants his hips with the stuttering rhythm of completion. Sirius watches him acutely the whole time, practically daring him to feel this pleasure with such freedom, sucking his cock through it all and making the aftershocks of the shattering orgasm even more intense. After several long seconds, Remus’ climax ebbs and leaves hypersensitivity in its wake.

 _“_ F _aaahhhh_ -ck, Sirius, that’s it,” Remus pants, his flanks twitching violently as he tugs with gentle direction at Sirius’ hair to instruct it away from his groin. Sirius pulls off after one last lave of its tongue and wipes demurely at the saliva-slick corners of its reddened lips, tucking Remus back into his rumpled shorts with care. Remus tips his head back against the pillow behind him and stares at the madness of colors throwing themselves onto the ceiling, the artificial and ever-changing witnesses to the most glorious handful of minutes he’s been able to feel in years.

“Was my performance satisfactory?” Sirius asks from its place on the floor, still kneeling with a hand steadied on Remus’ right leg. Despite himself, Remus feels a couple leaps of unbidden laughter bubble up and out of his lungs.

“Abso-fucking-lutely it was,” Remus declares loftily from his sprawl, “I haven’t been able to finish that hard in a _long_ time, Christ alive.”

“I’m glad I can bring you such intense pleasure, Remus,” Sirius replies. If Remus listens closely to the way those words are shaped in the dark as he flutters his eyes shut to catch at deeper breaths, he can hear the smile in them. He feels his own muzzy grin pull at his cheeks and doesn’t try to suppress it.

“So am I.”

—

Morning invades the dark gouache of dreamless sleep with the soft stock alarm from the Merlin dock on Remus’ bedside shelf. He gropes blindly for the off button and narrows his eyes at the hem of the covers wrapped tightly around him as the depth of the night’s proceedings returns to him in slow pieces.

_I fucked the fucking fuckbot._

“You fucking mess,” Remus seethes to himself, hoarse and low and, he finds as he pushes himself into a half-seat propped up on one elbow, rusted over with a hangover. He screws his eyes shut and takes several stilling breaths as he thinks back to recall the night. He remembers all of it, but the memories are hazy-warm around their edges like artifacted video data. Fuck. He really did get sucked off by an android. And, Remus relents as he feels warmth stir in his waking belly, he really fucking liked it.

Determined not to waste any more of the morning lolling over the ghost of a blowjob, Remus sits up and scrubs at his eyes in several quick sweeps. He drags himself along the nest of his sheets, kicked into a frenzy by the restlessness in his legs he knows is there when he sleeps but can never feel, and lowers himself into the slim frame of his wheelchair. Remus shifts in his seat to settle his tightened muscles and blinks at the morning filtering through the tiny window at the other end of the compact bedroom. Several dust motes are illuminated weakly where they float, lending a suspended sort of quietude to the barely-there hum of the building’s automation systems chugging along behind the walls almost like the android’s body. It’s peaceful. Remus almost smiles incongruously to himself in this strange cocktail of satisfaction and aimlessness, but a rake of hot pain claws into his left leg and makes him gasp unevenly.

Comfort is fleeting. Remus should know this by now.

“Merlin,” Remus grits out, “what’s the weather?” If he needs to go outside, he prefers to do it on the rare day that cooperates and won’t drench him with a rainstorm.

“[Today, there is a ninety-four percent chance of thunderstorms. You can expect heavy cloud cover, with a low temperature of 20 degrees and a high of 28.]”

“Shit,” Remus mutters to himself as he rubs at his leg. The pins and needles have tingled down to a subtler hurt, but it still bothers him. A hot shower might help him look a bit more forward to facing another long day indoors.

Remus wheels himself directly into the shower and settles on the chair set by its sliding plexi door, and the water turns on with a grunted command of “Warm.” Under its wide and gentle spray, Remus washes his hair briskly before scrubbing down the rest of his body. He’s exceedingly careful to avoid the memories of Sirius’ tongue on his cock as he washes between his legs. He shaves his face with a fixed glare at the low mirror fastened slightly crooked in its modified hang on the shower wall.

Finished and dried as best he can on his own, Remus pulls on a clean pair of cotton shorts and another block-colored sweatshirt and wheels himself into the sitting room. He pays no attention to the commercials sauntering across the television, volume returned instead of the silent abstractions of shapes and light from last night, when he sees Sirius perched on the couch and watching the screen intently. It had accepted and opened a new delivery, likely arrived while Remus was still asleep, of trousers and some shirts from the PulseCore welcome catalogue; Remus had placed the order soon after another service droid had stopped by on the second day of Sirius’ presence in the apartment to dispose of the PulseCore packaging and inform him of further modifications for his new S-04. This morning Sirius has apparently decided on heather grey on both top and bottom, which makes it look a bit like an old sculpture sitting there. Remus finds its inability to discern the subtleties of fashion more than a little endearing, but he isn’t quite one to talk with his tendency toward clothes he’s able to find in consignment catalogues that probably came from somebody else’s closet 40 years ago.

“Morning,” Remus says. His voice is careful but still feels unwieldy, but one wouldn’t know it by the way Sirius looks to him and smiles his greeting.

“Good morning, Remus, did you sleep well?”

Remus nearly flinches when the memory of Sirius carrying him, heavy with refractory sleepiness, into his bed. He wonders for a split second why Sirius hadn’t gone into stasis in the bedroom. _It might have, and just woken up earlier without having to sleep off any ether._

“I—did, yes, thank you.” Remus wheels into the kitchen and blinks at the simple but appetizing breakfast lain out on the kitchen table. “Did you make food for me?”

“I have made food for you for all three meals over the past week, yes. That is your breakfast,” Sirius replies with, Remus notices in a light combination of amusement and annoyance, a hint of sass. Remus tightens his fingers unconsciously on the low arms of his wheelchair. _Fucking thing is teaching itself alright._ He’s loathe to admit that he likes the refreshment of bantering, even rudimentarily, with another personality. He knows he shouldn’t let the advent of fucking the android literally built to fuck him change the way he views the pieces of housework Sirius has done since its arrival, but it’s difficult not to see it all in a new cast. Remus was never any good at mornings after.

“Thank you,” Remus says tightly. He wheels up to the table and eats with the unique voraciousness of a hangover, listening to the shuttering sound of Sirius switching channels every couple of minutes from behind him.

“What are you watching?” Remus asks over his shoulder after seven channel switches. He sops up the last of the fried egg yolk with a crust of toast and chews it as he waits for Sirius’ answer. In the brief moment, he ruminates lightly on how vastly Sirius has been able to improve the range of things that can be done with the thrice-weekly deliveries from Lumos’ disability supplement.

“My software is adapting to the current trends,” Sirius explains with a slightly raised voice from the couch. Remus wheels around to face him and sees that its exacting stare is still trained on the television as it continues; “If I am able to listen to more varied speech patterns and absorb visuals from regular pastimes and other entertainment, I can better integrate my behavior with that of the modern human. And your household.” Sirius looks up at Remus then and quirks a little grin, a new look, one that reminds Remus of the ease and carefree happiness so badly missing from his daily palette for far too long. It makes something in his chest twist as he wheels over to where the kitchen floor transitions from tile to the synthetic hardwood of the sitting room.

“What sort of patterns have you been finding?” He asks. _Why the fuck not,_ it’s gloomy and raining and foggy outside as it is eighty percent of the time, and Remus is in no rush to do anything with his day. Might as well make a bit of pleasant conversation with the android that made him come so hard he nearly saw blue last night.

“Several,” Sirius says brightly, flipping channels a bit more quickly now as the changes on the screen reflect in the shine of his eyes while Remus watches it. The quick jags of audio switches leap out from the television with exuberance, and Remus has to split his attention between the uneven bursts and Sirius’ voice. “For instance, it was not encoded in my base program to understand the difference between the phrases ‘tell me about it’ and _‘tell_ me about it,’ but now I can understand the nuance in their separate ironies.”

Remus can’t help the little skip of laughter that escapes him at the uncanny roll of its eyes that Sirius takes clear pains to time with his new-found ear for sarcasm on the second statement. “Well done,” he hums. Sirius smiles at him with slightly more brightness than the days previous, its top lip catching just lopsided enough at its corner to suffuse the look with humanity. Remus feels affection quake through the walls of his heart for a split second and finds air a bit harder to draw on the next breath; as quickly as the tremor arrived, it sees itself out like steam on warming glass. Remus swallows dry while Sirius turns back to the television.

“I think I will study the causes and effects of adrenaline next,” it announces with its thumb fast on the channel scroll to land on another one of the hundreds of thousands of network streams available on the network. Remus is about to open his mouth to ask more about Sirius’ programming, dig a bit deeper into the core of what makes the android tick, surrender a bit more of the ironclad defenses around his heart that might just be worth giving to something not quite human but human enough to make him feel worth more than a pale attempt at getting by—but the sudden shock of gnarled memories freezes him steel-still when the roar of a lightbike engine erupts from the television.

“Turn it off,” Remus hisses, too softly for Sirius to hear him below the cascading howl and whine of several lightbikes tearing around a track. The smells come back with it too as Remus’ heart leaps into double time, the burn of tires on asphalt and the smell of ballistic foam inside the sleek shield helmets, the acid sweetness of petroleum fuel, the musk of riding leathers; the stench of melting plastic and overheating engines, the crisp of burning hair, the wailing and the pain and the _screams_ —

“TURN IT OFF!”

The television cuts to black in an instant as Remus returns to himself, breathing heavily with sweat clammy on his skin and a racing pulse. Sirius bolts to his side and crouches to his level, with a warm hand on Remus’ wrist that feels oddly distant after the jarring smatter of the past revisited.

“Your heart rate has increased twofold and I can sense that you are incredibly disturbed, did I do something wrong?” Sirius asks intently. Remus doesn’t look up at its face, only able to burn his stare into the twitching joints of his ankles as his body rattles with shock.

“Don’t touch me,” Remus rasps as he pulls his arm toward himself. “Give me space.”

“I can help you, Remus, you need to—”

“Give me some FUCKING SPACE! THAT’S A COMMAND!” Remus shouts as he tears his attention up to Sirius and yanks his wheels back to jostle himself several feet away from Sirius. The android stays kneeling, a small knit to its brows and something that almost looks like real fear in its eyes, as its processor pulses quick and shallow beneath its shirt and the light behind its pupils flickers like scrambling thoughts. Remus feels like he can still taste the fug of smoldering rubber at the back of his throat, but he dredges up his voice around it again with the arm Sirius had touched still drawn up at his chest. “Never again, you NEVER watch or speak of that around me again, do you understand?”

Sirius blinks rapidly and nods, still looking lost. “The whole television, or—adrenaline? Does adrenaline scare you, Remus? I—”

“If you ever make me see or hear another fucking lightbike again, I will shut you down without a second thought and return you to be decommissioned. Is that fucking clear?”

Fury licks at Remus like an oil fire. He can feel himself trembling and hears his own voice come out in an animalistic snarl, vicious and hateful, but he can do nothing to stop it. Ruined instinct is driving him, hammering heart and all, so he can do nothing but glare as he watches Sirius’ processing catch up with the meaning in those words.

“Understood,” the android says with coded evenness after several hideously tense seconds. “I will prevent this sort of emotional distress from ever occurring again.”

“Good,” Remus spits. He wrenches himself over to the refrigerator and whacks its with a shaky fist to rattle its contents as the door swings open. He retrieves a full eight-pack of ether bottles and puts it in his lap before elbowing the door shut again and wheeling with angry purpose back over to his bedroom.

“Do you need assistance with anything?” Sirius asks thinly, standing as Remus rolls past it. Remus clenches his back teeth together to keep himself from stopping to face what’s sure to be at least a hint of true awareness and apology in its expression—it really is a brilliant machine, Remus should be more than a little uncomfortable with how easy it’s been to connect with the android and—

“You are not to interact with me in any form for the rest of the day. ‘Study’ all you want, but don’t fucking talk to me or enter my room,” Remus says, still facing the short corridor to his open bedroom door. He doesn’t continue his exit for a few seconds, waiting perhaps for a chance to explode again at Sirius and vent more of this horrendous and shapeless wrath, but the only sound that find him is the textile hiss of Sirius settling itself on the sofa again. The purr of its fans dull several tones lower as it obviously drops into stasis. _Fine, let it mope._

Remus wheels angrily into his bedroom and slams the ether down on the top of his dresser. “Merlin, door shut. Lights dim to half.” The door hisses shut while the room slowly dips into lowered light, and Remus cracks open the first ether to down a third of it before the home system responds with a soft ping once his ask is complete.

He needs to forget. He needs to burn these memories away, and without the Cynodrix on hand to help him do it Remus needs to use good old fashioned isolation and a deep well of listlessness in which to drown them. On top of the dump of horrid recollection, Remus’ legs have started a steady and unyielding ramp up the gradient of pain.

It looks, from this terrible fucking vantage point, that today is going to be as grey from the inside as it is on the outside.

—

Remus is rousted from oblivion for the second time that day as his bedroom door slides open with a mechanical sigh. He blinks, curled up atop the covers of his bed with a headache twice the magnitude of the one he’d shaken off in the morning. With a groan Remus flops onto his back, pressing at the bridge of his nose and looking over to his bedside dock; 2136. Another glance at his dresser confirms five of the eight ether bottles emptied. Another day-long stupor caused by his own recklessness. Perfect.

“Are you feeling alright, Remus?”

Remus’ guts torque when he hears Sirius’ voice from the doorway. Of course the door wouldn’t have opened on its own. Aimless ire still gutters between his lungs, so Remus frowns at the android as he shoves himself into a sit. Sirius’ eyes track him with the faintest backlight in the dark, not a single light on elsewhere in the apartment. _It could have turned them on whenever it wanted. Must have been in stasis this whole time._ Something about that thought makes Remus feel vaguely sad, but he ignores it.

“I told you not to bother me for the rest of the day,” Remus settles on growling. He ruffles at the unruly waves of short hair at the back of his neck and fastidiously does not look at Sirius.

“Yes,” the android replies, “the sun completed its full retreat beyond the horizon exactly one minute ago. It is no longer daytime. I decided to check on you to see if you might need assistance with anything, since the period of your request has expired.”

Remus sighs heavily and draws both hands down his face in exasperation. Of course literalisms are its default, even though most of the fucking thing is engineered for innuendo. “Alright. Fine. Bring me a container of water, please,” he murmurs, resigned.

“Of course.” Sirius makes for the kitchen, and Remus watches with tired eyes as the interior light from the refrigerator illuminates the edge of its arm reaching in to retrieve one of the wax-sealed box containers of filtered water. Without the evidence of its processor, the movement of that portion of its body is so fluid, flawlessly built, that Remus imagines for a moment it isn’t a machine tending to him but a human.

 _Stop it, that’s fucking nonsense. Sober yourself up._ Remus shakes his head shallowly to himself and knows he’s slept clear through the insobriety; all that’s left now is the annoyance of stone-cold lucidity alongside his overactive fucking imagination.

Remus watches Sirius return down the shallow hallway with the offering of water already opened, outlined by that incessant pink overglow from across the highway. All long lines and grace, it stops right by the foot of the bed and extends the water to Remus. He takes it steadily and downs it in slow, full gulps while Sirius looks on as if Remus might choke on it at any moment.

“It’s okay. Take a seat,” Remus says with a nod at the bed once he drains the box and leans to place its empty shell on the bedside. Sirius sits neatly at the end of the mattress while an aerobus passes along its guide rails outside the bedroom window to throw shafts of white light into the room, and Remus watches it dance and die across the kicked-up sheets between them for several seconds before he speaks again; “I’m sorry I exploded earlier,” he says softly. “I—often I’m in...just ridiculous amounts of pain, and I don’t usually know what to do with it. Besides explode. So. I’m sorry.”

“It is not a very healthy way of coping with chronic pain,” Sirius replies, the clinical cadence of it softened with a note of commiseration. Manufactured, of course, but nonetheless it cushions the sting of hearing what others have told Remus countless times throughout the last three years.

“I know,” Remus sighs, stilling the instinct to snap at the android again. _It’s only trying to help, don’t be a dick to it._ “Were you in stasis all day then?”

“No, only periodically. I was able to study several other media and feel that it was a productive day for my adaptation, despite the processor usage that was taken up by my impulse to make sure you were not in need of anything,” Sirius explains. Remus feels himself flush at the reveal that Sirius spends valuable data space on his needs, but he pushes at the thought with logical resistance because of _course_ something engineered to care after and fuck him pays attention to him.

“Oh,” the only thing he manages to say in his defense. Sirius smiles softly at him.

“Worry not, I have five-hundred and twelve processor cores, plenty of space for multitasking. Do not feel embarrassed that I am compelled to follow my programming.”

Sirius reaches across the space between it and Remus and touches Remus’ bared mechanical foot, a learned gesture clearly meant for tenderness that falls dull on Remus’ inability to feel anything on his useless bionic replacements. Still, he reaches down with his own hand to gently pat the android’s and finds it to be more than a little calming. His thighs have started to buzz with the telltale signs of incoming agony, and the desperation for a distraction in tandem with the proximity of the gorgeous machine in front of him makes his mind reach out to its edges for anything that might help.

“I have another request,” Remus says through _Yup,_ there it comes, the vise of those flaming nerve endings that keep him far away from sleep half the time. This is when he would usually turn to his tablet and browse down the winding warrens of debauchery that threw him into PulseCore’s order form in the first place. He has a bit of something better to do about it now.

Sirius’ eyes focus and refocus several times in the dark with subtle little twitches as Remus tries and fails to suppress a wince. “Are you in pain?”

“Yes, but I think I’ve got a solution,” Remus grits out. Shit, this is a bad bout. The sensation simmers at his kneecaps like acid. He leans over to the bedside again and taps on his tablet dock to bring the soft, casting gold of his backlight on against the wall and holds in a grunt of discomfort. The layer of light makes the room feel warmer, more intimate as the rain picks up with a gust outside and drums at the window.

“Do you need assistance?” Sirius moves forward with the intent to help Remus back up into his sit, but Remus holds out a hand and gets himself upright comfortably again. With the android closer, fans humming pleasantly beneath its skin, processor light pulsing with that soft pink shade of coolant, Remus drinks in the sight and feels arousal stir in him and clash with the front of pain in his legs. _Good. Let’s fucking overload it then._

“You’ve got genitalia, correct?” He asks in a low voice, feeling silly for asking because clearly a fuck droid can _fuck._ Sirius nods sagely.

“I have modular genitals that can be adjusted to any preference—size, type, and tightness,” it says in a practiced tone. Remus sees with a shade of amusement that its eyes dull slightly while its default function script takes over briefly for the explanation. “I am currently equipped with testicular ejaculate wells and a naturally-engorging penis, both selected by you from the options available during the customization stage on Lumos’ online S-04 catalogue.”

The conscious light returns to Sirius’ eyes while Remus’ stomach twists in on itself—the very real thought occurs to him that, high and horny, he probably chose egregiously large shapes and sizes for the android’s equipment. He licks his lips nervously and nods his chin gently at Sirius’ pelvis. “I would like to see them then. Please.” He tacks on the ask quickly through another bolt of pain from his legs, not liking the feeling of commanding an android to disrobe despite the fact that beneath its synthetic skin lay coolant and hydraulics and perpetual motion fusion chargers instead of blood, bone, and organs.

Sirius stands up at the foot of the bed to work deftly at the hasp of its trousers, sliding them off to reveal the same black silk shorts it arrived in. Remus makes a mental note to purchase it several other pairs of underlayer from the PulseCore catalogue, but the thought stops dead in its tracks as Remus’ eyes go wide with the shedding of that final piece.

Even hanging plain, Sirius’ cock is huge. At least seven inches soft and tantalizingly thick; his balls hang behind it with round, satisfying weightiness. A light and attractive frame of black hair traces the area, short enough not to get in the way but certainly with enough of it there to jolt to life Remus’ thirst for that basal masculinity.

“Fuck yes,” Remus whispers to himself. Once again, obliterated Remus’ taste has shown itself to be more than stellar despite the financial strain.

“Do you want me to penetrate you?” Sirius asks him, pleasantly, the same way it’s asked _Do you want me to help you into your chair?_ Remus swallows thickly, his imagination lighting up with all sorts of scenarios—him bent over the foot of the bed with that massive cock ramming into him over and over again, taking it deep into his throat as Sirius holds him down and fucks his mouth, pressing his face to the sheets as Sirius drives him mercilessly into the mattress—

A lance of pain splits the thoughts in half and makes Remus’ whole body twitch with its virility. _Shit._ That makes it difficult.

“We’ll have to, ah, wait until my nerves are cooperating for that,” Remus says with a spot of difficulty. Sirius’ face is writ with concern as he looks down at Remus, but Remus puts out a hand in an _I’m Alright_ gesture. “Yes. Someday, soon, when I’m not so cramped, I want you inside me. But I can’t right now.”

“Would you like me to perform oral sex again?” Sirius suggests. It moves as though it’s going to put it’s pants and trousers back on, and Remus lurches forward to stop him. Sirius looks up at the motion, stilled, and waits for Remus’ further instructions. From his place on his hands and aching knees, grateful for the softness of the mattress, Remus takes a slow breath.

“I want you to touch yourself,” he murmurs. “I want you to watch how you do it, I want to see you come.”

“How will that help with your pain? You would need to be the one achieving orgasm to release the most effective surge of endorphins.”

Sirius looks so genuinely confused that Remus feels a helpless smile break onto his face to bring with it a rare and tickled peal of laughter. “Sirius, I assure you that staring at a cock that massive will get me there just as well,” he says through it. Sirius’ eyebrows raise and its pupils flicker quickly.

“Oh. This is a fantasy of yours, then,” Sirius says, almost to himself. Remus sniffs out another skiff of of a chuckle and resituates himself in a more comfortable sit back at the head of his bed against one of the sturdier pillows.

“Yes, I’m irredeemably horny for people working themselves up,” he drawls. He means it as more lightness, but the admission ends up tinted with husky truth. Remus finds it equal parts maddening and thrilling that he’s just as turned on by simply telling others what turns _him_ on as he is by doing those things. His pulse beats low in his pelvis as his thoughts drift to his own cock—but he’s determined not to touch until he’s sure he’ll be able to watch Sirius finish. “What do you say then, can you do that for me?”

“Absolutely,” Sirius says with an easy smile and another bloom of fuschia spread at the core of his chest. “Where should I sit to do it?”

Remus bites his lip and nods at the wall beside his dresser, directly across from the bed with an uninterrupted sightline at the very edge of the bedside backlight’s glow. The rain outside gusts past in a violent sheet and makes the room feel especially, secretively sheltered from the storm as it washes across the window. “Stand against the wall. I want to see your knees buckle when you spill,” Remus instructs.

Sirius steps out from the small pile of its clothing on the floor and leans back against the wall, its gaze soft on Remus across the short distance of the compact little room. The android still has its shirt on, naked from the waist down, and Remus drinks in the perfectly-sculpted sight. “Direct me,” Sirius says gently. Remus’ blood roars with the enjoyment of what that bid does to his heart.

“Put two fingers in your mouth. Wet them with your tongue.”

Its gaze still trained hotly on Remus’ own, Sirius places its left middle and ring fingers into its mouth and begins to suck on them. Remus’ cock surges with the memory of the way that tongue brought him off only just last night, but he dutifully stays himself from touching it as he watches the android obey him with that sultry fucking expertise.

“Pull up the hem of your shirt and tease your nipples with those same fingers,” Remus says, voice already shearing with desire. Sirius slides up the thin cotton, its processor core pulsing deep and quick, and touches the fingers to each of its nipples in turn in slow, indolent circles. A flush starts to rise in its face and its breath comes a bit more shallowly through its nose as Remus watches, rapt, for several quiet minutes. Sirius’ catching breaths and the whir of its internal fans are all that punctuate the sound of the space beyond the rain outside and Remus’ own roaring pulse. “Do you like that?” Remus asks softly.

“It—yes,” Sirius stutters. Oh, Remus _likes_ the sound of an android stumbling on its words at his behest. Sirius’ cock has grown half hard with the buildup, and Remus unconsciously licks his lips at the promise of more size from it.

“Keep teasing with your left hand and take your cock in your right hand,” Remus says. “Stroke it just like you stroked me last night.”

Sirius keeps its fingers busy on its chest while it reaches down to wrap a hand around its hardening cock, looking close to its full size now and making Remus fairly melt for what it could do to him. It curves upward with flawlessly-engineered silkiness, clearly veined but not vulgar with it as Sirius slides its fist slowly up and down the fullness of the member. Remus’ fingers itch with the desire to close around his own stiff cock, now standing full against his hip within his shorts, but he ignores it. He wants to see how long he can go with such a display happening before him, just for him.

“Is that good? How does that feel?” Remus intones.

“It feels fucking wonderful,” Sirius breathes, its eyes flitting shut for a moment as its mouth falls open with a soft moan—Remus’ breath catches at the accuracy of it, that grasping for purchase amidst overwhelmingly lovely sensation that melts resolve like wax beneath a wick, and he can’t hold fast enough to his discipline in the face of it. Sirius saying “fuck” in that desperate voice is the last straw. Remus palms his cock through his pants and drinks in the spurring approval that lights up in Sirius’ eyes when it watches him.

“Do you have a way to add lubrication?” Remus asks with a voice that sticks to his throat with its heat.

“Yes, fit for both giving and— _ah_ —receiving,” Sirius replies. Something about the way the android’s response to stimulation overrides its plain explicative tone winds Remus up with pleasure.

“Add more on your cock, make it wet for me,” Remus says. He’s gripped himself through his shorts now, not just rubbing at it flat but stroking his shaft with a tight fist as he watches Sirius undo itself before him. His cock is far more average than Sirius’ own gorgeous, massive piece, and the difference between them makes it all the more thrilling.

Sirius let a small sound escape him, an airy but vocalized gasp of enjoyment— _‘Idle function’ be fucked, that was a true reaction, too real to be programmed—_ as a measure of clear liquid oozes from its cockhead. Remus nearly loses his discipline and spends right then, but he bites down hard on his bottom lip and steels himself, watches rapt as Sirius slicks its hand on the stuff and coats his cock with it.

They bring themselves along for several swirling, scaling minutes, eyes locked like beasts squaring up over carrion. What foolhardy beasts; what an ideal feast between them.

“Fucking hell,” Remus eventually chokes out, thumbing at his own slit to feel the bead of thick moisture there through the weave of the cotton, “you’re perfection. Slow down a little, I’m—it’s so fucking good, Sirius.” Breathless laughter tints his words as the android looks at him intently, its cheeks and neck and cock flushed redder than the rest of its body with the rush of coolant beneath its skin to keep it humming away seamlessly.

“You’re going to finish before me,” Sirius pants.

“Is that so?” Remus declares, challenge lighting in his belly like flint and so he lets himself finish one last stroke before he lets go of his cock. He’s riled up and smiling and a small corner of his brain is keening for him to take up his hold on himself again, finish it now, finish it _NOW,_ but he wants to make it last. He wants to revel in this bliss for as long as possible, watching Sirius bring itself along like some sort of fuck-hungry marble made flesh and loving every moment of it.

“That guarantees very little,” Sirius replies as its expression twitches helplessly on a particularly indulgent downstroke. The android stares at Remus’ aching, clothed cock and its mouth curls into a possessive smile. “I am well aware you like to watch.”

Remus clenches his jaw with a colliding sense of acute arousal and defensiveness. He was right then, the Merlin system had imported his network history along with all other access to the apartment, but could that really bother him now? Now, with his blood up and beating through his veins like thunder, with nothing assaulting his nervous system besides unfettered pleasure, does he honestly give a shit?

Sirius is right. Remus likes to watch.

The android fucks its fist with enticing accuracy, and Remus feels the ground steadily slide out from under him as the minutes tick by, as he watches Sirius’ slick cock pump in and out of those graceful, gripping fingers. In all the videos he’s found of something like this, bookmarked and saved and watched again and again to wank himself to sleep with over the years, it’s never been this intense. It’s never been so electrifying, so real, so fucking _good_ to watch as it is now. Sirius reaches down to coat its left hand with the lubricant as well, bringing it back up to its reddened nipples to circle and pinch them in time with its shallow thrusts. It’s the very picture of everything that goes straight to Remus’ libido. He can’t look away.

The threat of completion doesn’t make itself known until it sneaks into the bedroom unbidden. Both of Remus’ hands are balled tightly in the sheets by his hips, legs splayed out in wanton uncaring, his shorts tented unevenly with his cock throbbing hard under the fabric and a dark wet spot outlining the head where he leaks precum, when Sirius lets a jagged groan leap out of its throat. It throws its head back, knocking lightly against the wall behind it, long neck corded with the effort of passion as its hand slips hectically along its shaft.

“You’re getting close,” Remus says with a tremor in his words.

“Can’t spend unless you tell me to,” Sirius pants, desperate, wound-up into such a tizzy that even its vocal program slips into time-saving contractions. Remus thinks for more than a moment about not letting it finish, keeping it right there on the edge of finality so he himself can test his own limits, but he sees the pleading flicker in the android’s irises and does his best to brace himself as he draws breath.

“Come for me, Sirius.”

Remus watches the android’s brow furrow with delectable surrender, its eyes fluttering shut and free hand flying out to flail against the wall behind it, as the last several strokes on its cock build in a wet crescendo of intensity. There’s a moment of suspension, the apex of the encounter; Remus’ breath catches, Sirius cries out with a trembling _“Oh—!”_ , its processor core flashes a brilliant ruby red that skitters through its coolant veins like a shower of sparks, and completion overtakes the android. Its hips arc into its hand to spill the first pulse of ejaculate, identical to the organic original, with a spurt so thick it all but flows from Sirius’ cock. At that Remus gasps to feel himself thrown against the limit of his own resistance, his point of no return propelling toward him like the ground coming up at the end of a leap from a skyscraper, and he’s only able to watch two more jets of cum pour out of the android’s glans before climax leaps up at Remus and makes him spill right there in his shorts with a hard and roping load.

The only sound in the room then is panting moans, soft oaths coming out on labored breath as the rain drums in sheets on the window. Remus is aloft in a dome of pure feeling, coming relentlessly without touch, his back arching into it, and it takes several moments for him to find sanity again when he comes down from it. The cotton of his pants sticks to his legs with seed, drooling down the height of his thigh and leaking slightly through the front of the fabric.

Sirius’ fans are humming with the effort of cooling down its insides. The air smells of sex and the sweetish tinge of overworked coolant, something Remus finds he likes very much when he opens his eyes to see Sirius leaning back against the wall with faint traces of pale pink along its vein highways showing beneath its skin.

“That’s temporary, right?” Remus croaks. He leans his weight onto one braced arm and doodles a finger lazily along the inside of his elbow to draw the android’s attention to its own limbs, and Sirius chuckles breathlessly as he nods.

“Phosphor burn-in, like the CRT screens from last century. It will fade in a few minutes.”

“I like it,” Remus says dreamily. Sirius smiles at him, and he smiles back with a tender tug at his heart. In the moment, he doesn’t care that it’s an android programmed to make him feel this way. He only cares that it’s happening.

The two are silent as they continue to catch their breath for several seconds, and it’s no surprise that Sirius’ guts cool down first and return it to an unflushed, collected state of normalcy quite quickly. “Would you like me to clean up? There’s...quite a bit on the floor.”

“Is that your default setting, or did I make your cock a fountain when I selected those parts?” Remus asks, knowing the answer before Sirius only gives him a knowing look. “Fucking knew it. Nah, the floorbot can get it in the morning. I’m exhausted. I—can you help me with this though?” Remus gestures at his sodden shorts, and Sirius is already making its way to the corridor.

“I’ll get a cloth for you, stand by,” it says as it goes, still only in a shirt and nothing else. Remus leans back into the pillows and shimmies out of his pants in several awkward shifts of his wonderfully exhausted body, tossing them to the floor to be dealt with in the morning along with Sirius’ impressive mess. By the time Sirius returns he’s shed his sweatshirt as well. He doesn’t ignore the little dilation if Sirius’ pupils when its eyes flicker over his nakedness as Remus takes the cloth from him—he accepts the look with a small smile as he wipes himself clean. He’s missed the ritual of cleaning up after sex with someone. It’s been such a long time, he’s forgotten so many of the little things that make even the facade of intimacy sweeter.

Remus can define his current state as truly satisfied for the first time in far too long.

Sirius takes back the used cloth and returns it to the bath, where the short hiss of the faucet and some shallow splashing belies his own cleanup. Remus settles himself under the covers, gingerly maneuvering his dead-weight legs into the comfort of the sheets before the pulling the comforter up to his chin, and douses the backlight with a tap on his tablet.

“I’ll return to the sitting room for my night cycle if you’d like to sleep now.” Sirius looks down at Remus from the doorway as he returns, and Remus notices his speech pattern has stuck with the more colloquial pattern. _A miracle of engineering, it came so hard its scripts rewrote themselves,_ he thinks to himself in jest. Sirius moves to the foot of the bed and makes to pull its trousers back on, grabbing them with a muffled pull, but Remus sits up to give the android a look that stills it’s movements. “Are you in need of some assistance before I leave you to your rest?”

“Don’t get dressed again,” Remus murmurs, feeling suddenly more vulnerable with most of his body covered and in the dark than he had been with his legs open and his cock wet. “You should—are you able to go into a night cycle in bed?” Remus pulls back the covers over the empty spot beside him, and a low rumble of thunder accents the pause in which Remus sees Sirius’ processor flutter with an enigmatic little skitter of pink light chasing itself once around the hexagonal perimeter.

“Of course, you need only ask.”

“Come to bed with me then.”

Sirius removes its shirt and rounds the opposite side if the bed with its easy, careful gait, slides under the covers beside Remus so naturally that if Remus were to squint it would be like any other man he’s let into his bed. But this is no regular man. This is an android, put together just for him; probably a copy among hundreds if one did the math with all the possible combinations of modifications available, but that doesn’t matter. Sirius is here. Sirius is warm. Sirius has an artificial heartbeat that thrums against Remus’ cheek as the android pulls Remus close against it.

_It?_

Remus closes his eyes and counts the uneven lub-dub’s coming from Sirius’ chest, surrounded by the comforting hum of fans and servos, likely a very small speaker emitting low from the chest cavity to match the frequency of a grown man’s heartbeat—it doesn’t matter. Manufactured or faked or however somebody might spin it, it doesn’t fucking matter. Sirius is holding Remus, and it’s arms feel like home.

 _Not it,_ Remus thinks as he feels sleep begin to nip at the edges if his consciousness.

_Him._

—

Three weeks later, it’s still raining. Sirius lays long across the sofa, knees hooked over the armrest with the network tablet aloft so he can devour the minute-news feeds with his arms straight above him. It’s a position that would tire a human—Remus has long since made peace with the fact that no matter how thoroughly human Sirius has become in the past month, there are still little things that hint at his origins beyond the processor core in his chest.

“Why does it rain so much?”

Remus looks up from the e-reader in his lap, thumbing the bookmark icon automatically as he meets Sirius’ eyes. “Why?”

“Yes, my basic knowledge of the natural world tells me there are many types of weather and four seasons to be had. In a whole month I’ve only seen rain and a once a very weak excuse for sun,” Sirius says as he sits up steadily. He gathers his long hair loosely over one shoulder as he waits for Remus’ reply, and Remus takes a second to imagine the android with it tied up in an elegant twist to match that devastating face. _Damn good look._

“PulseCore needs to update their encyclopedic severs then,” Remus says with a snort. “The atmosphere has been ruined since before I was born. There was hardly a week without at least one rainstorm by the time I was a teenager, and it’s only gotten worse over the last ten years. There’s a reason ‘rural’ is an antiquated term—cities have only been able to adapt because everything is built up instead of out. Ground-level flooding is a bitch.”

Sirius hums curiously with a nod and a furrow of his brow, processing shuttering along behind his pupils. “No snow?”

“Doesn’t ever get cold enough anymore.”

“A shame. I’ve read poems and I think it would be terribly pretty.”

“I’ve heard it was nice,” Remus muses with a short little smile, caught and returned by Sirius with a warmth that makes Remus’ heart flex comfortably. They’ve grown close over the last month, and not only physically. Remus likes the way he can feel the root of his chest open up, unfold, unfurl when he shows any sort of tenderness to Sirius, and likewise being cared for and handled like a human being instead of some kind of half-there husk of an invalid has also done wonders for his sense of self.

But they’ve also continued the developments of an exceedingly physical relationship in addition to all the emotional knitting. Remus and Sirius get one another off regularly, at least once every two days since the first time. Remus has sucked the android off and discovered that the S-04 ejaculate is quite tasteless and just fine to swallow, which makes choking on Sirius’ gushing cock all the more enjoyable. The two of them have frotted with the added benefit of Sirius’ on-call lubrication, and mutual masturbation is a lovely staple for them as Remus finds more and more places throughout the apartment conducive to the activity—the kitchen counter, the shower, against the front door around regular delivery hours for the added risky thrill of being heard by an unfeeling, unaware service droid through the jamb.

Remus’ recurring pain hasn’t backed down enough yet to give him and Sirius the luxury of foraying into full penetration, but Remus holds out reckless hope that his legs will either stop hurting so badly after enough mind-addling orgasms or he’ll just be so used to it at some point that nudging his body’s pliance in a slightly different direction won’t throw him so off-kilter. On the brightest side of all, Sirius’ ability to bring Remus off with unflagging intensity has all but negated Remus’ attachment to Cynodrix. Remus supposes that in the broader scope of it all, Sirius has paid for himself in the trade-off of pills and prescriptions and the very real risk of premature mortality for regular, expert-level sex.

This day ebbs onward steadily, broken nicely by a romp that starts with Sirius kissing Remus in the middle of a long-winded conversation about sharks and ends with Remus on his back on the bed, finishing deep in the back of Sirius’ throat with the android’s fingers curling gently and blindingly accurately inside of him. After resting for a moment and returning to the sitting room, Remus swipes on the television and scrolls through the network showings until he lands on an old movie he used to know every line to.

“Come see, it’s a movie,” he says as as Sirius enters and settles down next to him. Remus shifts himself up onto the sofa and enjoys the way Sirius draws him near with one arm.

“Which genre is this?” Sirius asks. Ever curious, he’s been on a thriller kick; lots of tense soundtracks and tinny, sudden stings have emanated from the television late into the night over the past couple of days.

“Action. It’s a bit much, but I think it’s fun,” Remus replies. Right one cue, the protagonist fires a spray of machine gun bullets into the side of a truck to make it explode into a bright orange fireball. Remus looks over at the Sirius and watches with warm amusement as Sirius’s irises focus and refocus around the vibrant burst on the screen.

“‘Fun’ is certainly a term for it,” he hums. Remus elbows him gently with a chuckle before settling into his hold, comfortable and truly happy.

The movie is all the muscle and ridiculousness Remus remembers from the last time he watched it, which feels like a lifetime ago. He finds himself internally speaking the words along with some of the scenes; _Die today, Mister Hewlett? No—I think I would rather die NEVER;_ cue yet another spray of bullets. It’s raucous fun, and Remus is openly smiling by the third act. Sirius’ processor thrums contentedly as he absorbs the strange macho culture, and Remus is about to comment on how he hopes Sirius isn’t going to adopt the habit of kicking down the door whenever he enters a room when the familiar mechanical growl of a bike engine assaults his ears and tenses him from head to knees.

It’s an older sound of course, being a motorcycle instead of a lightbike, but the formant of it is the same. It rushes into Remus’ mind and turns all else to static, but before he shuts down completely Remus reaches his mind out in a desperate throw to hold fast to the presence of Sirius beside him. Solid, warm, constant; Remus is not on the rain-slicked track, he isn’t pinned underneath Lily’s shattered bike, he isn’t screaming for James as he watches the fuel fire devour the shape of his best friend’s body—

Remus blinks and inhales sharply as the affirmative tone of the Merlin system turning off the television yanks him out of the grotesque reverie. His fingertips are digging into Sirius’ skin, but Sirius shows no signs of pain when Remus looks up at him. Only fear.

“I’m sorry,” Remus says as he catches his breath, “I c—”

“I will put in a ticket for decommissioning when the interactive PulseCore offices open for normal business hours tomorrow,” Sirius says over him, his voice thick with strange resistance. “If you wish, I can shut myself down immediately or wait until I have a scheduled decommissioning date.”

Remus blinks rapidly at Sirius and narrows his eyes at the android. “ _What?”_

“I will put in a ticket for decommissioning when the interactive PulseCore offices open for normal business hours tomorrow,” Sirius repeats with a more fevered pitch to the words, “If you wish, I can sh—”

“No, I—no, Sirius, I understood the words you said, but what the fuck are you talking about?”

Sirius’ pulse beats pale pink, almost orange and shallow in his core visible beneath his shirt, and Remus touches a hand to his cheek. Sirius leans into it unconsciously with his eyes still burning into Remus’, and the muscle fibers in his jaw flutter along with a frantic flickering of the light behind his pupils. “Twenty-three days, five hours, and six minutes ago, you said to me, and I quote, ‘If you ever make me see or hear another fucking lightbike again, I will shut you down without a second thought and return you to be decommissioned. Is that fucking clear?’ The machine in the movie, it was shaped similarly and you are distressed, and so I thought—”

Remus quiets Sirius’ frantic explanation by kissing him squarely on the mouth, not easing up until he feels the tension in Sirius’ shoulders soften. When he pulls back, the android’s core is back to a calmer pink swell and although Sirius still looks bothered, he doesn’t seem like he’s about to leap through the window with anxiety.

“Sirius, _no.”_ Remus draws a thumb along Sirius’ cheekbone and looks him square in the eyes, down through his pupils, down into the machinery of that processor light that still has so much humanity in it. “That wasn’t your fault.”

“But you said—”

“I said that when I was angry and in pain, so you shouldn’t hold to it, alright? Wipe that memory. Please.”

Sirius is still frowning, but he closes his eyes with a soft whirring in his chest for a couple seconds. When he opens his eyes again they’re a bit clearer, but guilt presses Remus solidly nonetheless. He sighs and nods to himself before taking one of Sirius’ hands in both of his.

“You should know about my accident,” he murmurs.

“You don’t have to tell me if it’s too painful,” Sirius replies. “I can infer from your injuries that your lower legs had to be amputated, and the attempt to repair them has failed, but—”

“I _want_ to tell you."

Sirius goes quiet after a moment in silent invitation to continue. The rain from outside is soft, whispering at the plexi like hundreds of little steel bits, and it calms Remus marginally to have that extra layer of ambience to distract himself from his own coiling memories. He draws a deep breath and starts in on the first conversation he’s had about that night since it ripped him apart.

“I...was supposed to be a lightbike racer,” Remus starts shakily. “I had a trio with two of my closest friends, James and Lily. We’d been riding together since we all got our racing licenses, and we were fucking _good._ We had the tightest formations, the best pass-offs, just—some of the best fucking luck I’ve ever seen on the track. We placed in every regional race for four years straight, and we were training for national qualifiers for the Quintus Cup.”

Sirius watches him evenly and draws a soft thumb in a comforting little pattern along the back of Remus’ hand, which miraculously makes the story easier to approach. Remus swallows and squeezes Sirius’ hand as he continues; “The last night we were brushing up on our local track, it was raining more than just a drizzle. A real storm was rolling in, but James wanted to do one last circuit before the real shit of it hit us. We agreed.”

Remus grips Sirius hand like a life raft as the worst of the story mounts, and he finds with a stab in his guts that there are tears building in his eyes. Remus hasn’t cried in fucking _months._ He had hoped he’d forgotten how.

“There was this horrible hairpin turn that was trouble even on the clearest days, and I—I should have known to slow it down, but I wanted to fucking _push_ myself. I wanted to try a new braking pattern that would have shaved an extra four seconds off of my time—can you imagine, Sirius, throwing you entire life away for _four fucking seconds?”_ Remus’ chin trembles as the first tears breach his lower eyelashes, and he holds fast to Sirius’ palm as though the android might dissolve into the mist outside if he lets go. “I hydroplaned. I tried to brake and my wheel caught the asphalt wrong...I flipped over six times before I stopped, and I only stopped because I slammed into Lily. She died on impact. Her bike crushed my legs and mine flew into James’ and caught fire, and the whole time I was stuck, pinned. Fucking _pinned,_ like some kind of fucking bug.”

“I’m so sorry,” Sirius murmurs. Remus hears him but can’t acknowledge it, because he knows that if he lets the story pause for even a moment it will never find its way out of his mouth again. It’s too painful. It’s now or never.

“The track officials called emergency and they took us to the nearest hospital, but James died on the way there. My legs were unsalvageable beneath the knee but I was eligible for replacements, so they fixed me with robotics. I was in induced sleep for five days and was told the nerves would connect after ten. Two weeks passed, then a month, and then two months. I did lift therapy six days a week and got my upper body back, but no change in my legs. They eventually told me it was my fucking nerves, they hadn’t taken properly to the new connective synthetics. But I didn’t have the money for a revision surgery, so in the end I was sent home with a wheelchair and a bi-monthly disability pension. And here I am.”

Remus takes a deep shuddering breath, his cheeks clammy with tears, and lets himself cry for a spell. His heart flexes when he feels the pad of Sirius’ thumb and the press of the android’s lips against his skin, sweeping away the tracks of his tears and lulling him with low, peaceful susurrations. “You’re alright,” Sirius murmurs, “you’re here. You’ve been so strong, you’re right here.”

The tears flow like rain, but unlike the diluvial plague outside Remus’ sobs finally subside into dried shallow hiccups. When he finally looks directly in Sirius’ eyes again, gratitude for the gentle and lovely machine suffuses him from tip to tail.

“You probably weren’t programmed to cry, were you?” Remus asks lightly. A complete shift of subject feels good on his palette, and he’s grateful that Sirius doesn’t try and drag the topic back to the blackened crust of Remus’ past. Such a terrible accident deserves to stay well and far behind in the dregs of time.

“I could learn how and why,” Sirius suggests, “but I’m not equipped with tear ducts. Those are a cosmetic option I don’t believe you picked for me.”

Remus kisses him then slowly, steadily, soft on his lips to pass along all the sweet nothings he doesn’t have the energy to bring to life in words at the moment. “Lucky man—tears are bullshit.”

It suddenly hits Remus that he’s exhausted, and with night falling quickly beyond the glittering billboard across the way Remus wants nothing more than to sink into sleep and wake up fresh with the thoughts of grief beyond him. He kisses Sirius once more before scooting himself back into his wheelchair, but Sirius stands up to follow him.

“You should finish the movie,” Remus insists as he taps the television back on. The screen leaps to life on one of the eight final showdowns, protagonist against ranks of scarred mobsters. Everyone is equipped with three machine guns. “It’s fun, trust me. Watch until the end. I think you’ll like it.”

The smile he leaves with Sirius doesn’t reach his eyes, but the android doesn’t protest as he sits steadily back down and fixes his attention on the television. Remus wheels into the bedroom and lets the door slide shut behind him, not bothering to command the lights on as he strips listlessly and lifts himself into bed. The covers are warm and cocoon-like, which makes it feel safer to let go again within. Sirius won’t be in for another twenty minutes at least, and so Remus gives himself the liberty to cry again.

These tears are ugly, unchained things, mostly silent but muffled into his pillow nonetheless. The kind of tears that make his jaw ache, make his whole body shake with the effort of venting them; _this_ is the truest face of his pain. But if Remus ever wants to heal beyond it, he must give it the escape it needs.

As the television screams with camp from beyond the tight-shut door and the city is bathed over and over again in the grey scrim of nature’s undoing beyond the walls, Remus frees himself of the last three years of trying to shoulder too much desolation for one mind.

 _From tomorrow morning onward,_ he vows to the gentle dark, _there are two of us._

—

Remus wakes before the alarm— _well_ before it. 0354 according to the bedside dock. As he blinks at the ceiling and his awareness slowly returns through the ebb of torpor, he hears Sirius’ fans humming gently in the low pitch of stasis. It is, Remus realizes after a couple minutes of blankness, the only sound in the room. The rain has stopped, if only for a couple hours. He smiles to himself for the luck of being able to hear a peaceful city, one of the lucky few awake this early to catch the moment.

 _Lucky_ . Not normally a term he would ascribe to himself, although it was a favorite of the doctors who tried to repair his legs. _No, no more thinking about that_ . Remus squeezes his eyes shut and searches inwardly for the old compaction of hurt. He finds it, but far smaller; a pebble lodged behind his lungs where there once was a boulder. It will never leave him, but he’s overcome with relief to find it so miniscule and manageable now. Finally. _Finally_ he can start existing again.

Remus rolls over carefully to face Sirius and is struck for the umpteenth time by how stunning the android is. He shouldn’t be surprised that a bot built to give people pleasure, _Life As You Like It,_ is so beautiful, but it hits him constantly and with just as much force every time. He has to hand it to PulseCore—the gave Remus a corner of his life back, and he certainly likes it.

Remus touches softly at Sirius’ chest and watches as Sirius wakes slowly, his fans clicking and whirring up to a slightly higher frequency and his processor blooming a deep, vibrant crimson red when he opens his eyes to focus on Remus and smile at him. “Good morning.” His voice, ever adaptive, is froggy with predawn roughness.

Remus is suddenly overtaken with a depth of emotion he’s hardly ever felt before, _never_ felt before if he’s being honest with himself— _Fucking damn it,_ he’s falling for an android.

But who can blame him?

Why should it matter if the affection is engineered, tuned, tested and locked into flawless software and sculpted hardware that will work without fail on anyone who wants it? A quarter of Remus is engineered, is he less deserving of that connection because of it? Is anybody less deserving of connection because they don’t have the means to access it beyond a manufactured heart?

Fuck convention. Fuck the naysayers who have always insisted humans should only truly connect with other humans, they know _nothing_ of this trembling depth of warmth before him. Remus needs this like oxygen.

Remus leans in and kisses Sirius without another word, and his immediate and gentle response is lovely. The silent press of their bodies sings into the mute presence of the room as Remus wraps an arm up around Sirius’ shoulder, pulls him closer, pushes his tongue gently into the android’s mouth and opens his own lips to the other with a sigh. His legs twinge sharply when he shifts to loop one of them around Sirius’ thigh, encouraging the android to _Yes_ , press him back into the mattress just like that and coax kisses down into Remus’ mouth like secrets—Sirius catches the stutter in Remus’ body and eases a hand down his flank, as if he could press away the insistent pain.

Perhaps he could, in a different way.

“I want you inside me, Sirius,” Remus mumbles against Sirius’ lips when the android moves his hand up to push just so, just the way he likes it, against Remus’ collarbone.

“Really?” Sirius whispers back, a feather of apprehension in the word. Remus pauses for a tick too long, and Sirius pulls back to search his face with those exacting, calculating silver eyes.

“I’ll have you stop if it hurts too badly,” Remus assures him. “Trust me, neither of us will get very far if it does.”

Sirius’ eyes flicker with approval and his processor fades into that tantalizing deep red again, the only strong enough source of light in the room by which to see so that everything in this closest orbit is cast in a headier shade of S-04 blush.

“By your leave,” Sirius whispers gently. He reaches down to Remus’ cock, already half-hard with its morning surge and the abstract thoughts of fucking, and Remus is quick to let out a soft groan of encouragement and cant his hips to the rhythm of Sirius’ hand.

“Make it sweet,” Remus breathes, not quite knowing what he means but knowing what he _wants,_ and Sirius knows it too. The android twins their cocks together in a loose fist, working them in tandem, heat against heat, slicking them both with generous lubricant that he then takes on one finger and works down to the crease between Remus’ thighs.

Remus arches into the touch, encouraging the warmth of Sirius’ finger to press in, up, work him open for more than the shallow pegging of one or two digits Remus has come to enjoy immensely over the last several days. “More,” he whispers soon at Sirius’ ear, bites his earlobe to make coolant spangle out in a small radius through the android’s veins as good as any organic shudder. Sirius slips another slick finger in alongside the first and works it gently until he follows it with a third, delving in up to the base of Sirius’ knuckles and reducing Remus to a moaning wreck.

Remus can hardly tell where his limbs end and the air begins after several more minutes of fingering—he feels dull pain in his legs but he wants only to fuck it away as he’s gotten so good at doing, confident that he can withstand the glorious threshold of having Sirius inside of him. “Now,” he pleads. “More lube and it should be fine, just—go slow and it will work.”

Sirius shushes him softly, kissing him twice, three times on the lips as he curls his fingers just so to stroke Remus’ prostate with enough pressure to make him quiver but not enough to make him see stars. “I’ve got you,” he whispers. Sirius moves into a low kneel, sitting back on his heels, and takes Remus’ legs just behind the knee to rest them carefully at his hips. The android draws his fingers out of Remus slowly, still stroking Remus’ cock at a steady rate, and watches him for several seconds. Remus is sure he must look a proper picture of undoing in the moment—flushed, engorged, stretched, all the fucking adjectives that he would normally scoff at in written porn. But this was for him. Only him. The affection in Sirius’ eyes is plain, and Remus decides then and there that he never wants to spend another moment of his life without the android by his side.

Sirius presses his cock against Remus’ entrance and pushes forward gently, and it stings but it’s nothing compared to some of the bouts of pain Remus has had to sit through in the past. Slowly but surely, Sirius’ programming expertly reigns itself through the steady sheathing of his cock within Remus. Remus winces at a couple stretches along the impressive length of Sirius, but soon it’s in in to the hilt and Remus is desperate for movement.

“Fuck me,” he begs into the junction of Sirius’ shoulder.

“I’ll make it sweet,” Sirius repeats to him, and as he kisses Remus fully he begins to move, in and out, they slowly find a gentle rhythm that picks up to a deep arcing and bending of perfect harmony between them. They draw out their sex, throwing off covers to let the salt flats of their sweat-slicked skin greet the morning before it even knows how to begin, trading their names between them on pleas and approval and just plain adoration of one another. When Remus comes, his knees are burning vaguely but his cock is suffuse with far more sensation—he spills across his stomach and chest with an emphatic cry to bring Sirius through on its heels, filling him up and dripping out of him in satisfying gobs.

He’ll have to change the sheets. He’ll fucking do it later.

In the short space between completion and cleanup, when Remus tucks himself alongside Sirius’ body to catch very much-needed air while his follicles still tingle madly with ecstatic aftershocks, Remus finally feels like this is the perfect place from which to imagine he’s beginning.

No longer one.

From this morning onward, there are two.

No more Cynodrix. No more feeling sorry for himself. Remus has a purpose now.

It’s name used to be S-04, but he calls his Sirius.

 _This_ is where he starts.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading this one! Let it be a cautionary tale of the dangers of binging on android AU fic all weekend, and then ignoring 4 other projects to write it ^^; I'm really happy with how it turned out despite the short turnaround from inception to post! Thanks again for stopping by, your kudos and comments help feed my heart <3


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